Archaeologists have surmised that it took mankind thousands of years to master fire. Compare that with today’s technology tools, which have a lifespan that is somewhere around one to five years – okay, there are a few programming-language dinosaurs that have hung around a while (COBOL anyone?). Well, after more than three years, RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) are getting significant traction from organizations, designers, and developers. But RIA is just in its puberty stage. It’s mature enough to do amazing things and bring fresh life to an old technology paradigm, yet it still requires appropriate leadership and mentoring to direct the next steps. Breaking these barriers creates new challenges.
Here are a few RIA 'Fires':
· Tracking – Determining your return on investment is often difficult with any Web asset, but it’s particularly tricky with RIA applications, due to a lack of out-of-the box tracking features. Most tracking methods are proprietary and must be embedded in the code behind the application. Think of it as placing code behind event triggers to log the use. You could add this at a page level for each control or function in the application. You can enable logging of the usage by adding a Web service to the event; we have done this often with Google Analytics via a JavaScript calls and redirection methods.
Flex in Motion has recently released a commercial product that enables RIA Flex and AIR applications to be Google-Analytics-enabled. There is also an interesting new analytics tool from
Gigya that tracks the viral and social connectivity.
· Search Engine Indexing – Typically, RIAs do not have specific URLs associated with each transition element. In other words, as a user navigates the RIA, the same base URL is still persistent. One method we have deployed using Flex is to enable the Browser Manager Class that maintains the history of navigation together with Page level scripting to alter the URL and establishing indexing. More importantly, Google announced the support for indexing Flash applications. Combine this with the unique URL ability via logging and this expands the out-of-the box results of Flex currently scene. These methods and tools still fall short when it comes to dynamically driven, data-sourced controls and information.
There will be much more coming as Adobe, Google, and Yahoo are teaming to provide better indexing as noted in the recent
news release.
· Better Tools and Controls – 2008 represents the dawn of an Industrial Revolution for RIAs, in terms of new tools and controls available to the designer and developer. We need this to continue. The adoption of RIAs in the marketplace by larger enterprise organizations, designers and engineers will create a natural groundswell, as tools and examples are published and disseminated. But this will take time.
· Best Practices – There are several evolving best-practice areas in place for RIA design and code. The main players (Adobe, Microsoft, and Google) need to have better IDE (Integrated Development Environment) methods that provide best-practice enforcement. Several documents exist that serve as useful starting points and references for the general community and organization adopting RIA. Here are some noteworthy references:
Like our caveman forbearers’ ancient fire experiments, we need to understand how to solve these challenges with RIA in order to develop their full potential without getting burned.